Why Corbyn must go

[nwhyte]

I'm not deeply invested in the fortunes of Britain's Labour Party. (I accidentally rejoined the Lib Dems last year, but haven't paid any subscription this year so possibly am no longer a member.) But I am very interested in questions of political leadership, and in the quality of democracy in a political system

Comments

[raycun]

I have no reason to doubt all the stories about Corbyn being organisationally very poor, and terrible at the business of leading a parliamentary party

[nwhyte]

And many of the people making the organisational argument are people who oppose Corbyn on the issues too.

True enough; but Richard Murphy is not.

[gonzo21]

I have many reasons to doubt almost all of the stories regarding Corbyn's alleged incompetence.

This is the New Labour machinery we're dealing with here. An organisation that had no qualms about producing the dodgy dossier to take this country to war.

Rubbishing everything Corbyn does is small potatoes to them.

[lovingboth]

Given the greatest gift in terms of an irrefutable demonstration of governmental incompetence any post-WWII opposition party has ever had, Labour under Corbyn are 11% behind.

You can argue that it's all the fault of the MPs (although the bad local election results pre-date any shadow cabinet resignations), but let us imagine that someone who wants to take the railways back into public ownership - hardly the most 'Blairite' of policies - is lying about how bad a leader Corbyn is.

Do you think they will stop, should he win again? Is the solution to give up any chance of winning the next General Election, get rid of the current batch of MPs, and hope anyone elected next time doesn't mind waiting for the next Tory disaster, say in 2045?

[unwholesome_fen]

The general election is four years away. I'd expect another leadership challenge before then, but also a lot to have changed in the party in general, assuming some of the hundreds of thousands of people joining become active. If Corbyn wins this round, he has until (say) 2018 to deliver a policy package that most people get behind, or they will find someone else. Since Brexit will likely gridlock everything else, I think it is actually less urgent than people think for the Labour Party to have worked out what it now stands for before around then - whatever deal May ends up with is going to leave a lot of people (especially her own party) unhappy. I think both parties are due for a split, and it's probably better for Labour if they get it out of the way first.

[lovingboth]

Labour's problem is not a policy thing. It almost never is.

When Robin Cook was shadow health secretary, he used to point to polls showing Labour's health policy had a big lead over the Tories. As there wasn't any Labour health policy worth the name in place, it was simply that the public (rightly) trusted Labour more on health. Why bother coming up with policies?

Here, the public simply don't trust Labour to be able to govern the country better than the worst bunch of Tories.

I'm also not so certain that there won't be a general election until 2020.

Yes, both Tories and Labour could sort out some of their issues by splitting, but with 'first past the post', that puts you at a huge risk of losing elections as a result.

[rfmcdpei]

I'm sorry.

[steer]

The thing I would add is this. He's been leader for a long time now and I wanted some clarification on his policy direction. So I went to his website for a list of economic policies. It's basically a list of the text of speeches. So I went to the labour website for similar. Nothing I could find apart from a cookie policies.

It looks like he's firmly into the business of speechifying and stating loudly what he's against but it's actually very hard to find out what he is actually in favour of.